Bocar Dia

Churn is a growth killer. It’s 10x easier to keep a customer than find a new one. But most companies spend all their energy on acquisition instead of retention. Solve churn, and you’ll solve growth.

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Do not read this post if your quota attainment per seller is >70%, Average Deal Sizes have grown >2x in the last year and if you don't need more Sales Pipeline. For those of you that do, I'm proud to announce a revolutionary way for your GTM teams to drive productivity with DatabookGPT. But, don't listen to me, listen to our customers: “As we pilot the new DatabookGPT, we find it’s driving down the creation of our initial account plans from seven weeks to seven minutes,” said Chris Smith, Chief Strategy Officer at Grant Thornton. “It's a game changer." "Every AE at Databricks lives by our value of 'customer obsessed.' Understanding the value the Data Intelligence Platform delivers for every customer is essential. DatabookGPT was built on Databricks and supports our sellers by giving them that account intelligence," said Ron Gabrisko, Chief Revenue Officer at Databricks. "Through our teams' use of Databook, we saw our average deal size increase by 54.8% in FY24", said Kirsty Mundy, WW Field Enablement Microsoft, Industry Solutions Delivery Learn more at www.databook.com. It's Generally Available now for companies looking to grow their deal sizes, shorten their sales cycles, and grow pipeline. #accountintelligence #enterprisesales #strategicrelationshipmanagement

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Need to transform your SDR team’s performance? How to help your sales team achieve results that will earn you trust and budget. First, audit your content arsenal. Are your SDRs armed with the right tools? Invest time in creating or curating great collateral that addresses your Ideal Customer Profile’s (ICP) pain points and your solutions. Convert the best-performing material into templates. If budget allows, invest in intent tracking tools like ZoomInfo. Provide your SDRs with real-time intelligence on potential leads. This could involve identifying companies visiting key pages of your site or using tools that detect general intent based on topics. Now, launch micro-campaigns. Develop industry-specific value propositions and targeted landing pages. Your SDRs need ammunition that speaks directly to each vertical. Always measure & optimize. Track response rates, meeting conversions, and pipeline velocity. Use these insights to refine your approach. Don’t fear failure – it’s the only way to hit the target. Make small changes based on what works and what doesn’t. What’s working for your SDR enablement? While it can be an overwhelming project, it’s crucial for establishing the foundation for solid growth. #B2BMarketing #SalesEnablement #CMO #Leadership

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"It's table stakes for merchants to be everywhere customers are" - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify Finally a definition of omnichannel that I agree with -- from the lens of the consumer. Shopify & Target announced a partnership to allow select merchants to offer their products on Target Plus, the retailer's third-party marketplace. Why is this such a huge announcement? 1️⃣ It is a stamp of support by two of the largest commerce players that omnichannel is the future You need to be wherever your customers are. 2️⃣ Target brings the power of discovery to Shopify merchants. While Shopify has incredible enablement tools -- it is in the best interest of the merchants to support discovery channels outside of the extremely expensive Meta. Otherwise Amazon will continue to be the beneficiary of brands seeking discovery for their products. 3️⃣ For Target, this partnership provides their consumers with access to top brands that have cemented their success in the DTC world like True Classic & Caden Lane 4️⃣ DTC should not be thought of as separate to retail. They are both shopping experiences for the consumer that should speak to one another. 5️⃣ It cements the importance of marketplaces for both retailers and brands as key growth channels going forward. --- If you still think omnichannel is just a buzz word, you're wrong. If you still think retail & DTC should be thought of separately, you're so behind. Omnichannel is now and the future of how consumers will shop. Brij is building the solution that will help you connect consumer touch points across every channel you sell through. #shopify #target #omnichannel

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YOUR WIN/LOSS DATA IS BS – AND THE LIGHTSPEED 2024 REPORT PROVES IT Take a close look at the Lightspeed 2024 Sales Benchmark Report. It highlights “inaction” (53%) and “economic uncertainty” (47%) as top reasons for losing deals, and “product features” (68%) plus “prior experience” (39%) for winning. But if these are the only insights in your CRM, you’re missing the strategic value hidden in your deal data. –– THE UNSTRUCTURED DATA PROBLEM –– Your GTM stack is overflowing with unstructured data — calls, meetings, emails, etc. Even if you’re using platforms for call recording and coaching, that alone DOES NOT STRUCTURE your data for strategic analysis. If you rely on reps to tag “budget” or “ghosting,” or AI-summaries, you lose critical, nuanced details that drive strategic decisions. Real Win/Loss insights require instant visibility into buyer pains, success criteria, and competitor references (straight from calls, emails etc). They also require a robust gap analysis (think MEDDICC done right), so you see exactly how far the buyer is from their ideal outcome — and how you close that distance. If this data is NOT STRUCTURED in your CRM, you’ll only see “lost due to inaction,” missing the pain you never addressed or the budget holder you never validated. –– WHY STRUCTURED DATA MATTERS –– Without it, you can't get to the real insight that can transform how you sell. Marketing can’t craft competitive messaging if they can't analyse why another vendor beat you. Sales can’t coach effectively if the excuse is always “no champion.” If this data is not structured in your CRM, it can't be actioned and monitored. Result? Your entire org is FLYING BLIND. –– THE GAP ANALYSIS (MEDDICC etc.) –– Gap analysis maps the buyer’s current state to their desired future state. If these details aren’t structured in your CRM, you’ll stay stuck with generic “budget” or “timing” excuses. –– WHY THIS DATA MUST LIVE IN CRM –– Everyone — Sales, Product, Marketing, CS — relies on the CRM for real-time insights. By structuring conversational data into MEDDICC elements, quantifying them into numbers for strength of each element and combining with activity metrics, sales can finally FORECAST, and use resources efficiently. CRM should guide the full journey (sale, retention, upsell), revealing which ICP segments thrive and which might churn — so you can tailor product, messaging, and resources. –– THE FINAL WORD –– If you’re fine with “economic uncertainty” or “prospect went silent”, keep letting unstructured data go to waste. But if you want to truly improve and use your data as a competitive advantage, you need to systematically structure and monitor deal data by leveraging Epicbrief to autonomously pull data from your existing tools like Gong or SalesLoft or similar, structure and populate data in your CRM. No UI. Zero effort from reps. Turn your data into a strategic weapon for growth. ————— Curious how Epicbrief does this? DM me. #b2b #sales

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hey RevOps - if you're a high-velocity SMB shop selling a large number of small deals, how should you grant quota credit to AEs? 🤔 Signature date? Payment date? Contract effective date? Like most things in RevOps, simple questions like this do not have simple answers. This question was posted in the RevOps Co-op Slack group recently and the community provided some 🔥 feedback like: 📍 Signature date seems to be the most popular choice, but always with a big caveat 📍 That caveat relates to the amount of churn or turnover when it comes to signed deals that don't pay - if the AEs are closing crumby customers that don't pay, then you want to use payment date instead 📍 If you have deals that get signed far in advance of the contract effective date / subscription start date, this adds additional risk to revenue - so may want to consider using the contract effective date instead 📍 Some folks do a mix; for example, 50% at signature, and 50% at payment (or some other metric, like 6 months after deal signature) 📍 In all cases, you want to make sure the structure is set up to drive the behavior you want to encourage without a huge delay between the work done and incentive provided Anything else you'd add to this list? #revops #revenueoperations #salesops #salesoperations #compensation #incentivemanagement

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This is a huge week for B2B SaaS. Shopify is crushing it with $8B+ ARR and accelerating, while Datadog is hitting $2.6B ARR with 27% growth.  Palantir Technologies is growing 27% at $2.8B ARR and Atlassian is aiming for $10B ARR in 5 years. Abnormal Security is doubling at $200M ARR too. The takeaway?  Even at these insane levels growth is real if you nail your Go-to-Market plan. For early stage founders, this is proof that with the right GtM direction + execution, you can scale big. Keep iterating and don’t sleep on your strategy - we are here to help! #B2B #SaaS #Growth #GtM #Founders

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Sellers who have "need for approval" from their prospects are 35% less effective (RAIN Group). It's not your job to make your prospect feel "good" all the time and here's a prime example: When Spencer Ivey is asked for a discount, he simply nods his head and says "....Okay..." He doesn't jump to justify his pricing. He doesn't immediately start negotiating. He lets the silence linger. No doubt, this makes the prospect who just asked him for a discount feel somewhat uncomfortable (Ironic, since that's what they were trying to do to HIM when they demanded a discount!). 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞, 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫𝐬. Salespeople that want their prospects to like them (need for approval) will immediately jump to problem solving mode when they get asked for a discount. But the best? They're ok with a little discomfort, even if it means they're less "likable". They know that the discomfort will compel the other party to justify their ask with more information (information is your greatest ally in a negotiation).  

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If you decide your sales team needs to help with renewals make sure they are incentivized correctly (I usually see a 70% new bookings goal and a 30% renewal / upsell goal). If you don't incentivize hunting, sales tend to farm too much and your growth will slow.

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If you are an SDR manager, you can help your team get meetings by responding to the outbound you're receiving from other vendors. Ask the SDR who is emailing you if they use anything for revenue intelligence [obviously insert your category] and go from there. Find out the information, and then give it to the lowest performing rep on your team for an easy win. Here's the email you can draft for your SDR: "Hey VP of Sales, I spoke with my manager who mentioned you were using XYZ already, she talked to John (one of your SDRs) who gave us the tip. Would you be willing to have someone on your team evaluate us as an alternative?" ^^ It sets. Try it! #sdrlife #sales

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Renewals are the lifeblood of every SaaS company. However, we don’t talk enough about what makes a great AM/CSM who handles renewals. Since there are so many lists on what makes a great AE, I thought I’d take a stab at what makes a great AM/CSM who handles renewals: 1/ They prioritize the renewals that move the needle Renewal rate comes down to simple math. What renewals are going to move the needle for them? Great AMs/CSMs spend their time where they’ll get the most bang for their buck. 2/ They prepare 6 months in advance Average AMs/CSMs prep 3 months in advance. Great ones plan 6 months in advance. This includes asking hard questions well ahead of time during a mid-year QBR, so they know where to spend their time. 3/ They can re-sell the product Stakeholders change. Priorities change. Competitors try to break in. Great AMs/CSMs can sell the product as well as their AEs and know how to position their value props and handle objections. 4/ They know how to negotiate I don’t know any procurement person in the post-ZIRP era who doesn’t try to negotiate their contracts. A great AM/CSM knows how to turn negotiations into win-wins. 5/ They know the difference between procurement and decision-makers Similar to point four, they know how to negotiate and with whom. Negotiating with procurement is much different than negotiating with a key stakeholder. Each party wants something different, and it’s important to recognize what that is. 6/ They know how to rope in their AEs or extended teams Just like the best AEs know how to “quarterback” deals, a great AM/CSM knows how to rally resources to help with renewals. AEs, Execs, SEs, and Professional Services can all be brought in to help show the customer extra love. 7/ They develop a renewal champion We always talk about champions in the presales process, but not enough about champions during renewals. A great AM/CSM knows how to develop champions to help push renewals through. An AM/CSM who knows how to do these things is worth their weight in gold. Keep them happy as long as you can!

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Some predictable pipeline reflections from GTM audits this week: 1️⃣ Many companies are selling too fast, and it's ironically slowing down closed deals. Talking about product and price too early, pushing buyers faster than they're ready to go, dragging buying committee members along that have no idea what you're talking about. Sometimes three steps is faster than one. Be methodical to accelerate pipeline velocity. 2️⃣ Inbound is often fool's gold. The numbers make you feel good but the quality is fleeting and inconsistent. The healthiest companies combine inbound and outbound into an "allbound" strategy that drives more predictable performance and results. 3️⃣ Marketing programs and budgets in complex sales cycle situations need to be managed from the bottom up, not the top down. Cost per lead isn't nearly as important as customer acquisition cost (CAC) and managing a body of work that's at and below that number on a consistent, repeatable and scalable basis. 4️⃣ Smaller numbers are most often your most important numbers. Stop celebrating webinar registrations, booth drop-bys and social followers. Even engagement doesn't matter unless it's paired with an accurate, comprehensive ideal customer profile (ICP) definition. 5️⃣ Politics is killing internal progress and innovation. The most successful leaders create a culture of collaboration and transparency, maintain a "team sport" mentality to go-to-market, and encourage if not require ongoing professional development and learning.

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Introducing Account Research! Here to help B2B RevOps eliminate their hardest account data gaps. Check it out, link in the comments.

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If you're an e-commerce business, you’ve likely heard about Shopify Audiences. These powerful, data-driven audience segments can significantly reduce your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and streamline your marketing efforts. Here’s why they’re so effective: - Targeted Advertising: Shopify Audiences use purchase data from across Shopify's vast network, ensuring your ads reach people who are more likely to convert. - Higher Conversion Rates: By targeting high-intent users, your ads are more relevant, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates. - Lower CPA: With improved targeting and higher conversion rates, your overall advertising costs decrease, giving you a better return on investment. So what's the catch? While Shopify Audiences can dramatically improve your CPA, there's a catch. As more businesses use these audiences, they become saturated. This means your ads are shown to the same users repeatedly, leading to reduced effectiveness and increased costs over time. Also, they're not usually very large, meaning they're not able to sustain the depth of spend that would make a big impact for your brand. At JUICE, we've been hard at work developing a solution to overcome this. To maintain the benefits of Shopify Audiences and prevent saturation, integrating additional data sources is key. This is where JUICE AI Audiences come in. 🚀 JUICE AI Audiences is our proprietary approach to generating high intent audiences based on customer intent signal, your existing customers, and many other factors. How JUICE AI builds on the success of Shopify Audiences: - Diversified Data Sources: JUICE AI Audiences supplements customer data with additional behavioral, third-party, and real-time analytics, keeping your audience pool fresh and diverse. We work across 80+ data vendors to scale this as well. - Continuous Optimization: Our tools continuously monitor performance, ensuring your ads are always targeted to the most relevant and engaged users. - Scalable Growth: By integrating multiple data sources, we help your campaigns scale sustainably without hitting the usual plateaus. Case Study: A mid-sized e-commerce business experienced a 35% reduction in CPA and a 50% increase in new customer acquisitions over six months by integrating JUICE AI Audiences along with Shopify Audiences. 📈 Audience vendors have become a key way to get RoAS where it needs to be in today's expensive CPM environment. Don't sleep on them!

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According to Lightspeed, 41% of new logo deals slip and 38% fall through. For a pipeline of $10 million, that's $4.1M slipped and $3.8M in lost revenue 🤯. But, that's not all: Generating $10 million in pipeline is costly. Here is an example calculation: Assumptions: - Average Deal Size: $50,000 - SQO to Closed-Won Conversion: 25% - Marketing Cost Per MQL: $800 - MQL to SQO Conversion: 20% - Overhead for sales and enablement: 20% of revenue target Calculation: 1. Opportunities Required $10M in pipeline at a $50K deal size = 200 Opportunities 3. MQLs Needed - MQL-to-SQO conversion: 20% - MQLs needed: 1,000 (200/0,2) - Cost per MQL: $800 Costs: 1,000 MQLs x $800 = $800,000 4. Sales Team Costs - Win rate: 25% win rate - Closed-won: 50 deals (200 x 25%) - Sales rep (base + commission): $120K annually - Number of Opps/ reps: 100 Total cost: (200/100) x $120,000 = $240,000 5. Overhead and Tools: - Assume 2% of pipeline target: $200,000 Results: + Marketing: $800,000 + Sales Reps: $240,000 + Overhead/Tools: $200,000 -- Total Cost: $1,240,000 Top 3 reasons for deal slippage (according to Lightspeed report): 1. Delays in decision making 2. Exec sponsor left 3. Lost budget Those reasons showcase a weak sales process: 1. Systemic pain and negative economic impact unclear = no urgency 2. Multi-thread to reduce dependency on one sponsor/ champion 3. Lost budget means you're not solving a costly/revenue reducing pain How do you mitigate deal slippage?

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Summary of conversations at conferences about AI in commercial functions: Person a: what are you using AI for in your business? Person b: 🤷‍♂️ we tried to make a super cool predictive model but our data was too dirty. Also our revops team was understaffed. I did ask ChatGPT4 to make me a list of restaurants to visit at this conference. Person c: that’s weird, I asked it to make me a picture this morning Person a: 🙋‍♂️ still wondering….what are you using it for in your business again? I believe that AI will ultimately be really helpful to many different business functions. We’re in the very early innings, though.

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28 CCOs and Post-Sales leaders have spoken 📢 What is the CURRENT STATE of Customer Success? -- Over the past 6 months, I asked 28 podcast guests this question. Nearly everyone had the same answer. What's the Current State of CS? ➡ "Unsettled" ➡ "Identity Crisis" ➡ "Transformation" ➡ "Really messed up" (but don't listen to me, hear for yourself directly from folks who feel this way... totally unprompted). -- Why is this function in SUCH a state of flux? ✳ The problem is not CS... it's a CEO / Board problem Very few Enterprise SaaS companies today actually have strong Product-Market Fit (PMF). There are tons of non "mission critical" products out there justifying themselves for a spot in the stack. For 70% of leaders I speak with, they say their CS teams are filling key product and value gaps that the company has not yet addressed. Just because you had PMF at $10M does NOT mean you will keep it at $20M, $200M or beyond. It's always changing and the only way to keep it is to listen to your customers selflessly. ✳ Without strong market fit, CS becomes focused on "Checklist Management" rather than Change Management Tasks, journeys, and "busywork" that comes out of a lot of CRMs and CSP workflows are designed to show CS activity is up... but it is not at all aligned to moving the needle for the Customer. In order to become "mission critical", post-sales MUST. DRIVE. ADOPTION. And that has very little to do with what your company thinks is important (sentiment, engagement, usage) and everything to do with what your customer feels is important (improving their workflows, achieving their business goals, hitting their leading indicators). ✳ CS efforts do not correlate to Revenue nearly as much as they need to CEOs, CFOs, and Boards look at two metrics: how much $$$ did you bring in, and how much $$$ do I need to pay you? If the first is less than second, you are literally a cost center (not just perceived as one). CEOs, CFOs, and Boards are expecting the payback period of investing in CS to be one-year. If teams are expecting CS activity to generate revenue WITHOUT a Customer Value Framework proven to increase adoption... teams will end up spinning cycles and burning cash (and unfortunately RIFs are not far behind) -- So... what does the FUTURE of CS and Post-Sales look like? (teaser: video coming out in 2 weeks) This is really a question that CEOs, CFOs, and Boards will have to answer. They have to see demonstrated quantifiable value coming out of post-sales to continue investing in the function. To position CS and Post-Sales in the best possible light, we have to reimagine our function through the lens of our Customer. It's less about how we define Customer Success. We need to ask: How does our Customer define Success? What is your take? #FutureCustomerValue #CustomerValue #CRO #CCO

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I did an informal poll on CSM vs Sales commission splits. I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 95% of companies do not have Sales take a commission on renewals unless it’s a particularly challenging one; the AE is there to help with it as a “bounty renewal”. in this case, the AE gets a % but is not taken from the CSM. Other interesting data points: "Commission on upsells and renewal made up 30% of the total compensation package. However, the exact commission % was determined by dividing the 30% by $$$ into the total ARR managed by the CSM." What metrics should this be based on? Most followed this model to Typically, companies that are earlier in their CS maturity will base this off a few leading indicators (adoption milestones, EBRs, etc.), and then move to comping on lagging indicators (retention, expansion, NRR, etc.) once their leading indicator activities have been proven. The following are examples of metrics you can use, not an exhaustive list: Leading: QBRs and/or EBRs (attained vs scheduled) Product adoption milestones (product dependent) Lagging: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) - this is likely the most common Retention Expansion Advocacy (hard to make this scale across large teams and mixed portfolios - this is better as a SPIFF or annual metric to Bonus on) From there, you can determine the weight of each metric on the bonus. I'll give an example using a bonus that is achieved by a renewal retention goal and an NRR goal. Criteria for 100% Bonus Attainment: 90% Renewal Retention (50% weight) 125% Net Revenue Retention (50% weight) "This keeps it pretty simple with two priorities. Retain and Expand Revenue. The Retention goal being assessed separately ensures CSMs don't have significant churn masked by massive upsells. In this example, if a CSM had 85% Retention and 115% NRR, they'd end up at 93.22% to goal for their overall commission/variable comp."

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I did an informal poll on CSM vs Sales commission splits. I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 95% of companies do not have Sales take a commission on renewals unless it’s a particularly challenging one; the AE is there to help with it as a “bounty renewal”. in this case, the AE gets a % but is not taken from the CSM. Other interesting data points: "Commission on upsells and renewal made up 30% of the total compensation package. However, the exact commission % was determined by dividing the 30% by $$$ into the total ARR managed by the CSM." What metrics should this be based on? Most followed this model to Typically, companies that are earlier in their CS maturity will base this off a few leading indicators (adoption milestones, EBRs, etc.), and then move to comping on lagging indicators (retention, expansion, NRR, etc.) once their leading indicator activities have been proven. The following are examples of metrics you can use, not an exhaustive list: Leading: QBRs and/or EBRs (attained vs scheduled) Product adoption milestones (product dependent) Lagging: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) - this is likely the most common Retention Expansion Advocacy (hard to make this scale across large teams and mixed portfolios - this is better as a SPIFF or annual metric to Bonus on) From there, you can determine the weight of each metric on the bonus. I'll give an example using a bonus that is achieved by a renewal retention goal and an NRR goal. Criteria for 100% Bonus Attainment: 90% Renewal Retention (50% weight) 125% Net Revenue Retention (50% weight) "This keeps it pretty simple with two priorities. Retain and Expand Revenue. The Retention goal being assessed separately ensures CSMs don't have significant churn masked by massive upsells. In this example, if a CSM had 85% Retention and 115% NRR, they'd end up at 93.22% to goal for their overall commission/variable comp."

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